On our MG field trip to UC Botanical Gardens (Berkeley) last June, we almost missed a unique display. There is no sign-post. While strolling, we happened to look up and notice a "structure" that, from a distance, seemed to merely provide shade to plants. We asked a volunteer, who said it is an artistic configuration of honeycomb. We headed up the path.

"Garden of Mouthings" is perched above the Garden of Old Roses and just below the water tanks. We were taken aback by the peacefulness. A quiet, cool spot to pause and rest awhile. Concrete-cast stools drip with honey. A comfortable bench-seat styled from bags of soil amendments. Photos of honey bees and our often overlooked native bees performing their unsung ecosystem services. The honeycomb structure undulates like a wave--rises and falls, rolls, swells, flows. The translucent quality and weave of the natural fiber is reflected with the help of the sun--another asset to our environment. It is a vignette, an impressionistic scene that fades into the surrounding vegetation. Art and science meet and flow, if you will. A review I read described it as such: the context being the human emotion evoked by the natural world and woven into it, part of a barely seen whole.    

"Garden of Mouthings" was designed and installed in 2011 by landscape artist Shirley Alexander Watts. She was inspired by Sylvia Plath's poem, "The Beekeeper's Daughter."   She did not take the cheerless perspective common in this and most of Plath's writings but, rather, Plath's descriptive words of the garden as delightfully lush and peopled with bees.

                                "A garden of mouthings, Purple, scarlet-speckled, black.

                                 The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks."

The volunteer had mentioned another art piece near the water tanks, but we did not find it. We wondered if there were other art creations we had missed along the way. It's a pity the garden has neither signage at path intersections nor icons on their map, so as to alert visitors to explore another wonder of these gardens. It is a most pleasant place, enhancing the holistic perspective of the garden as an ecosystem.

Garden tips from Watts at Minimalist website:

http://www.minimalisti.com/uncategorized/07/garden-design-gardening-tips.html